To indicate another aspect of the change, it has been calculated that whereas non-Great Russians had composed almost half of the membership of the First Duma, in the Third there were 377 Great Russians and 36 representatives of all the other nationalities of the empire.
In the election of 1912 the government made a determined effort to obtain a Right majority that would eliminate its dependence on the Octobrist vote, but it could not quite accomplish its purpose. The Fourth Duma contained approximately 185 representatives of the Right, 98 Octobrists, and 150 deputies to the left of the Octobrists. Because of their crucial central position, the Octobrists continued to play a major role in the Duma, although their number had been drastically diminished. For the rest, the gain of the Right found a certain counterbalance in the gain of the Left.
The Octobrists, who had replaced the Cadets after the electoral change of June 1907 as the most prominent party in the Duma, represented both the less conservative country gentry and business circles. While their Left wing touched the Cadets, Right Octobrists stood close to the old-fashioned
Right. The party enjoyed the advantages of skillful leadership, in particular the leadership of Alexander Guchkov, and operated well in a parliament. The Octobrist deputies, it might be noted, were the wealthiest group in the last two Dumas. The Cadets, who became the loudest voice of the Duma opposition, were, above all, the party of professional people, although their influence extended to large layers of the middle class, especially perhaps of the upper middle class, as well as to some landlords and other groups. The Right, which consisted of more than one party, defended to the limit the interests of the landlords, although it also made demagogic efforts to obtain broader support and paraded some priests and peasants in the Dumas. Bitter dissatisfaction, widespread among the Russian masses, found a modicum of expression in the Duma Left.
With the Duma under control, the government could develop its own legislative program. The architect of the program, Stolypin, has been described as the last truly effective and important minister of imperial Russia. Stolypin's aim consisted of 'pacification' and reform. 'Pacification' meant an all-out struggle against the revolutionaries, for, although the mass opposition movements characteristic of 1905 no longer threatened the regime, terrorism continued on a large scale. Practiced especially by the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries and by the Socialist Revolutionaries-Maximalists who had split from the main party, terrorism caused some 1,400 deaths in 1906 and as many as 3,000 in 1907. The victims included police officers and agents, various officials, high and low, and numerous innocent bystanders. In August 1906, for example, the Maximalists blew up Stolypin's suburban residence, killing 32 persons and wounding many others, including the prime minister's son and daughter, but not the prime minister himself.
Stolypin acted with directness and severity. By the end of 1906, 82 areas in the Russian Empire had been placed under different categories of special regulations; also, the publication of 206 newspapers had been stopped, and over 200 editors had been brought to court. Moreover, Stolypin introduced summary courts-martial, consisting of officers without juridical training, which tried those accused of terrorism and rebellion. The trials and the execution of sentences were carried out within a matter of some two days or even a few hours. Although the special courts-martial lasted only several months - because Stolypin never submitted the law creating them to the Duma and it expired two months after the Second Duma had met - they led to the execution of well over a thousand persons. 'Stolypin's necktie' - the noose - became proverbial in Russia. The policy of 'pacification'
succeeded on the whole. The Maximalists and many other terrorists were killed or executed, while numerous revolutionaries escaped abroad. A relative quiet settled upon the country.
It should be added that Stolypin continued to sponsor police infiltration of the revolutionary movement and an extremely complex system of agents and informers. Such police practices led, among other things, to the emergence of remarkable double agents, the most notorious of whom, the unbelievable Evno Azeff, successfully combined the roles of the chief informer on the Socialist Revolutionaries and of leader of their Battle Organization. In the latter capacity he arranged the assassination of Plehve and other daring acts of terrorism.
Stolypin intended his 'pacification' to constitute a prelude to important changes, especially to a fundamental agrarian reform. That reform, introduced by an imperial legislative order in the autumn of 1906, approved by the Third Duma in the summer of 1910, and developed by further legislative enactments in 1911, aimed at a break-up of the peasant commune and the establishment of a class of strong, independent, individual farmers - Stolypin's so- called wager on the strong and the sober. The emergence of a large group of prosperous and satisfied peasants would, presumably, transform the Russian countryside from a morass of misery and a hotbed of unrest into a conservative bulwark of the regime.
The new legislation divided all peasant communes into two groups: those that did not and those that did engage in land redistribution. In the first type all peasants simply received their landholdings in personal ownership. In the communes with periodic redistribution every householder could at any time request that the land to which he was entitled by redistribution be granted to him in personal ownership. He could also press the commune to give him the land not in scattered strips, but in a single location; the commune had in effect to comply with this request if separation occurred at the time of a general communal redistribution of land, and it had to meet the request 'in so far as possible' at other times. Similarly, the commune had to divide its land into consolidated individual plots if requested to do so by not less than one-fifth of the total number of householders. Moreover, separated peasants invariably retained rights to common lands, meadows, forests, and the like. Indeed a partitioning even of pastures and grazing lands was permitted in 1911. Finally, the commune could be entirely abolished: by a majority vote in the case of nonrepartitional communes, and by a two-thirds vote in the case of those that engaged in a redistribution of land. It is significant that the reform made the household elder the sole owner of the land of the household, replacing the former joint family ownership which remained only in the case of households containing members other than the elder's lineal descendants.
Stolypin's major agrarian reform - the impact of which on Russian economy and society will be discussed in a later chapter - received support from a number of related government policies and measures. Notably, the Peasant Land Bank became much more active in helping peasants to buy land, while considerable holdings of the state and the imperial family were put up for sale to them. Also, reversing its earlier attitude, the government began finally to encourage and help peasant migration to new lands in Siberia and elsewhere in the empire. Stolypin's reform, it should be added, made peasants more equal legally to other classes, not only by reducing the power of the commune, but also by limiting that of land captains, and by exempting peasants from some special restrictions. In a different field of action, the ministers and the Dumas worked together to develop education, which made important advances during the last years of the imperial regime. In fact a law of 1908 foresaw schooling for all Russian children by 1922. The government also broadened labor legislation, worked to strengthen the army and national defense, and engaged in a variety of other useful activities.
However, all this fell short of fundamental reform. Only Stolypin's controversial agrarian legislation attempted a sweeping change in the condition of the Russian people, and even that legislation had perhaps too narrow a scope, for Stolypin was determined not to confiscate any gentry land, even with recompense. Moreover, progressive measures remained intertwined with reaction. Thus constitutional Russia witnessed a terrorism of the Right - for example the assassinations in 1906 and 1907 of two Cadet deputies to the First Duma - as well as a terrorism of the Left, and the terrorism of the Right usually went unpunished. Stolypin, himself from the Western borderlands, acted as a nationalist and a Russificator, for one thing reviving the ill-fated policy of trying to Russify Finland. Besides, the government lacked stability. The prime minister, who was after all something of a constitutionalist, antagonized much of the Right in addition to the Left. He managed to have one important piece of legislation enacted only by having the emperor prorogue the legislature for three days and suspend two leading members of the State Council; his high-handed tactics made the Octobrist leader Guchkov resign as chairman of the Third Duma. On September 14, 1911, Stolypin was fatally shot by a police agent associated with a revolutionary group. Stolypin's successor, Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, possessed intelligence and ability, but not his predecessor's determination or influence within the government. After a little more than two years he was replaced by the weak and increasingly senile Goremykin, who thus became prime minister for the second time. Goremykin assumed the leadership of the government in early 1914; in a matter of a few months he and Russia had to face the devastating reality of the First World War.
